Member-only story
The Last Neanderthal
Fiction
They were the last of their kind.
She wove long-stemmed flowers around his body, alternating yellow, purple, and white in his shallow grave beneath the white pine. She stroked his cheek and gazed at his face, still as stone except for a tuft of course red hair that fluttered back and forth in the breeze over his forehead, which loomed like a large granite ledge over his wide nose and full lips. The last of his kind she thought, and now she was the last of her kind.
She covered him with soil and spent the remainder of the afternoon collecting large rocks to cover the grave so that the pawed creatures would not dig him up. When she finished she sat silent for some time next to her work. Her spirit welled inside of her and released itself through her eyes, wetting the stones over his grave with what was past.
Standing watch throughout the night, so that she could be sure he made it to his destination safely, she saw several creatures skulking along the perimeter of the fire and she grabbed the large stick sitting in the flames and swung it round and round at them. She screamed through the fiery circle that the hot tip of the stick formed before the creatures.
When the Mother Sun came up over the line across the land and shone, she bowed her head to the Earth in shame that she had not brought…
